So, this is the video that I plan on showing on Tuesday to accompany my presentation. Since it’s over 5 minutes long, I’ll only be showing part of it, so if you’d like to see the rest, you can watch it here! Once again, my topic is homosexuality in China in the 2000s and this is one of the few current sources I’ve found that address it from a “research” or at least investigative point of view.

This popped up on my feed reader in the last couple of days and I thought the class might find it interesting. The Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film, and TV is going to start cracking down the content of Internet videos. Some of the more interesting restrictions, which include the mandate that if your video includes these, it must be edited or deleted:

-Distortions of Chinese culture, Chinese history, and historical facts; distortions of the history of other countries, and disrespect to human civilization and the culture and customes of other countries;
-Promotion of a negative or decadent outlook, world view, or value system, or deliberate exaggeration of the ignorance and backwardness of ethnic groups or social ills;
-Clips that SARFT has cut from films and TV shows or has prohibited from being broadcast;

Sorry for the delay in getting this up! I was having issues pulling up umw blogs.

My song is called Zombies Ate My Neighbors and it is by Single File. Yes, it’s really about zombies. I decided to take a pop culture approach to this assignment. I’ll put the lyrics and my analysis behind a cut so it doesn’t take up too much room:

When posting the video earlier, I forgot to post the video that is actually pertinent to my research! This 2008 video is called “China: A Little More Gay” and provides a very brief overview of the homosexual experience in Shanghai, including the growing nightlife/bar scene and has a few interviews with Chinese people regarding homosexuality.

Two crucial things to keep in mind during this video are 1) homosexuality was a mental illness until 2001 in China, so this is all very new, and 2) this is Shanghai, which is much more modern and “Westernized” than much of the rest of the country (from what I know).

I couldn’t embed this, since it isn’t a youtube link, but it’s right here:
http://current.com/items/89095645/china_a_little_more_gay.htm

So it’s been awhile since I posted, but I came across this video today in my Google reader and thought it was pertinent to what we’ve been studying and interesting in it’s mix of old and new. From what I can tell, Jay Chou is a Taiwanese pop singer who sings about social issues, and the lyrics to this song, “Ninja”, are translated here: http://www.jaychoustudio.com/jay-chou-translations/ninja/14/translation